Spanish Google News?

Google may be getting ready for a spanish news service.

[NGSpain]

I have just notice Google is including a "Noticias" section, a small news section that appears between “categories” and the search results, apparently indexed from some Spanish news partners. Does it mean Google is getting ready to deploy a Spanish International version of Google News?

I work for a news organization, does anybody knows what it takes to get into Google news (besides writing to [e-mail], what I find somehow unappealing).

[Marcia]

Welcome to WebmasterWorld, NGSpain.

According to the Google News Information [news.google.com] page, Google serves news for these:

Australia
Canada
Germany
India
New Zealand
United Kingdom
United States

Was it a main U.S. Google search you saw it on?

[NGSpain]

Thanks, Marcia

Yes, so far Google only covers those countries, with Germany as the newest one, but when you do a search using Google Spanish localized version, some news-oriented queries (ej. politicians, pop-start names, etc) do show a small news section that appears between “categories” and the search results, apparently indexed from some Spanish news partners, something I think is new.
I believe this indicates that Google may be already taking news feeds from some selected partners, setting things up for a complete Spanish or Latin oriented Google News Service.

[heini]

NGSpain, those are regular news like Google has displayed for a long time on top of many searches.
Google started early last year, after AlltheWeb had come out with their News search, to crawl lots of news sources on a daily basis or even more often. AFAIK there's nothing you can do to get included - sources get picked.

This is however not to be confused with the News portal Google is doing. That is available only for English and German so far. Though Spanish certainly would be a language with high priority on the list I doubt Google has any immediate plans on expanding the News portal. I don't remember the exact source but a Google person has confirmed that when introducing the German version.

[lazerzubb]

Thanks for that info Heini, i wonder if the reason why german news was rolled out before spanish and other languages was due to Monika?

I do think they will launch a spanish version in the future though, the spanish speaking section of the web is enourmous, and i think it's the fastest growing language on the net too.

[NGSpain]

>NGSpain, those are regular news like Google has displayed
>for a long time on top of many searches.
>Google started early last year...

Yes it did started early, but in English queries, no in spanish localiced version, they have just started doing it.

And maybe they picked those by hand, as you sugest, but I think is also likely that they may have engage in agreements with those News Organizations to receive a XML live feed, preparing the way to a Spanish Google News service.

[Marcia]

>>fastest growing language on the net too.

There's a tremendous Spanish speaking market even right here in the States. Some of us were talking about that here around two years ago.

From an Adage Article, HISPANIC MARKETING MAGIC FOUND IN LANGUAGE MIX [adage.com]:

Best Buy, Staples and Energizer are all in reviews to name Hispanic agencies. The majority of ads targeted at this market are in Spanish, and analysts' forecasts -- after the Hispanic TV upfront presentations last month -- that Univision ad sales will be up 20% indicate healthy growth for Spanish-language media.

There are a lot of advertising dollars going to reach the market, particularly the affluent. Look at the list of names here:

[adage.com...]

[takagi]

.. i wonder if the reason why german news was rolled out before spanish and other languages was due to Monika?

Monika? You mean Monika Henzinger? Well, she is German, and she did write Query Free News Search [henzinger.com] with 3 others Googlers (Bay-Wei Chang, Brian Milch & Sergey Brin) this year. But let's face it, German is more used than Spanish on Google. Look at the graph Languages Used to Access Google at Zeitgeist [google.com]. The graph was updated a few days ago with the June 2003 data. Check how the 146 pixels are divided for last month (I agree you can sometimes argue about 1 pixel more or less for a certain language):

English.. 72px (49%)
German... 15px (10%)
Spanish.. 12px (8%)
Japanese. 10px (7%)
Chinese.. 08px (5%)
French... 08px (5%)
Italian.. 04px (3%)
other.... 17px (12%)

The graph shows that the percentage of Spanish users grew a lot (same for Chinese and 'other'), but German is still more used than Spanish at Google.

[lazerzubb]

takagi, yes that is correct it seems german is more popular than Spanish, just another reason to add spanish news, this only shows that Google doesn't seem to have succeded in the spanish languages, as they have with languages like german. Even though Spanish speaking population is much bigger population of online users that german speaking (I am correct in this right?)
(And yes spot on with monika)

[takagi]

Google News is offered in several versions, each tailored to a different national audience. If the version you're seeing doesn't have the right focus for you, scroll down to the bottom of the page and select the appropriate country from the list there. If the country you're looking for isn't included yet, please check back in a few weeks. We're working to provide access to news and information to all of our users, so you can expect to see new countries added over time.

Google News - FAQ [news.google.com]

So Spanish will also come. BTW, why is there no www.google.es? Something political or was that URL registered by somebody like www.google.dk which was until recently an online bookshop in Denmark?

[heini]

I don't think it's got much to do with Monika Henzingers roots - the answer is in what languages are used to query Google, which is different from what languages prevail on the web, which is different from total language spread worldwide.

Takagi, I don't doubt Spanish News portal is coming at some point. The snippet you quote however rather pertains to different english speaking countries. The News Portals are organised around nationalities.
So I'd much rather expect additional english speaking countries than additional languages.

NGSpain, I bet there are several spanish news sites which got refreshed daily for a long time. I thought I had seen those noticias for a while, but may very well be wrong there.
I'm afraid however this is not a sign of an upcoming spanish news portal.

[takagi]

I thought I had seen those noticias for a while, but may very well be wrong there.

Those Noticias can now be found in 5 languages:
English (News [google.com])

German (News [google.de])

Spanish (Noticias [google.com.mx])

Italian (Notizie [google.it])

French (Actualités [google.fr])

For Spanish they started some 2 months ago:
May 20, 2003: Google Headlines in Spanish and Italian [google.blogspace.com]

P.S.
Anyone an idea about www.google.es?